Thursday, August 21, 2008

A road, a journey, the myriad of metaphors for life or life experiences, and for an analyst, a metaphor for the experience of psychoanalysis itself. But the 2007 Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Road by Cormac McCarthy [who also won the National Book Award for All the Pretty Horses, (1992)], a book of "gratitude" dedicated to his young son John Francis, is almost too much to bear. I recall writing the film review, based on another of McCarthy's novels, No Country for Old Man, and alluding to psychoanalysis as no country for the faint of heart. The opening page of The Road had me reevaluating thinking myself of pretty strong constitution. McCarthy writes "the frailty of everything revealed at last."

I thought the novel might be describing the metaphoric annihilation of a severely depressed person, an existential angst par excellence of aloneness in a cruel world. The father in The Road says "if only my heart were a stone." And he recognizes that "he could not enkindle in the heart of the child what was ashes in his own." The Road is profoundly sad, but, unlike depression, beautiful. Tenderness and sacrifice evident in a yellow toy truck or a half packet of cocoa. Frighteningly, aliveness seemed to interrupt the relentless deadness only in passages that described a kind of kill-or-be-killed mentality, and a spark of love or tenderness almost too much to bear. I thought of patients who cut themselves.

There is a kind of 'be here now' to their lives, whether vigilant for marauders or a swim in a mountain pool. There is no past, and no place to be. The compelling reality is the search for food and for shoes.

The terse sentences, the paucity of dialogue, the bleakness, all reminded me of Hemingway, but, in The Road, evenwith the man sometimes dreaming of "aching blue" sky, or of his bride, or of flowering woods, there is no room here to entertain illusion, as Jake (The Sun Also Rises) thought Brett might, evident in his question to her, the book's last line: "Isn't it pretty to think so?" The Road has not a chapter, not a name (except Papa; and a name used as a lie); with almost every thing barren, sometimes not even a completed sentence, not an apostrophe, save one, for contractions, the daylight, grudging, the sun, indifferent. Corpses grimace, and the mummied dead are everywhere.

The boy is (understandably) frightened, alot. Perhaps the most heartbreaking of all is the recognition of what children in this (our) world always bear. The father, exhausted, irritable, tells his son, "You are not the one who has to worry about everything." The boy replies, "Yes, I am. I am the one."

Though the environs in The Road stand in stark contrast to descriptions of nature's lushness in McCarthy'sThe Orchard Keeper, I was nonetheless reminded by The Road of the journey of Inman, in Charles Frasier's Cold Mountain, on his intrepid trek, plodding through starvation, murdering marauders, and cold. But in The Road the man and his son trek through a nuclear winter of total destruction. If there is parallel devastation for Inman, it was what he thought became of goodness within himself, whereas the boy in The Road still carries the "fire" within, and his father believes this enough to keep them both alive against all odds for as long as necessary. Sometimes the analyst carries the belief inside, enough to propel analyst and analysand through the devastation. Sometimes it is the analysand who is responsible.

Perhaps in the last line of her NY Times review (Sep 25, 2006) of The Road, Janet Maslin said it best: "'The Road' offers nothing in the way of escape or comfort. But its fearless wisdom is more indelible than reassurance could ever be." Another Janet, Janet Malcom, might have written that about psychoanalysis, had she read The Road before writing The Impossible Profession.

A new study by two University of Chicago students has demonstrated that children ages 7 t0 12 years are hard-wired for empathy. Their MRI studies demonstrating their findings, with graphics MRI images, are at the above link. Their studies demonstrated that the areas of the brain associated with moral reasoning are activated when the children see pain inflicted upon others. These are similar to findings that have previously been demonstrated in adults.

Welcome!

Welcome to "Contemporary Psychoanalytic Musings," the blog of the Tampa Bay Institute for Psychoanalytic Studiesor, as it is conveniently known, T-BIPS. We invite you to post your comments on psychoanalysis and books, film, conferences, the media, art, theory, clinical situations, current controversies, social issues, and anything else as seen through a psychoanalytic lens. We look forward to a spirited dialogue with you.Lycia Alexander-Guerra, M.D.TBIPS PresidentGabcast! Welcome! #3

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About TBIPS

In 2005 a group of psychoanalysts & psychoanalytic psychotherapists convened to explore possibilities for meeting the educational needs of clinical professionals in the Tampa Bay area. Out of those discussions evolved a new institute, the Tampa Bay Institute for Psychoanalytic Studies. Consistent with the spirit of collegiality, openness, and diversity that inspired its development, the new Institute is non-authoritarian and democratic. Training programs utilize progressive and classical concepts which have been endorsed by contemporary critiques of psychoanalytic education. Believing that the capacity to think psychoanalytically best develops in an atmosphere of inquiry, open dialogue, and active participation the founding members sought to integrate these values into the structure of the new Institute and into the process of training. A precedent of collaboration and mutual respect for the contributions of all faculty and candidates was established enabling our mission to gain immediate representation in our actions.